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Free Calendar Template

No Strings Attached

When developing websites for various churches, I am usually able to use a blogging CMS to meet their needs for simple site maintenance and update functionality. Yet, I was often at an impass when it came to doing a monthly calendar. All the systems out there are either too robust and pricey (listing things down to the minute, like a personal day planner), or open-source but far too bloaty code-wise. I needed a good, standards compliant solution.

This led me to take matters into my own hands, and whip up a simple calendar template that can be hand-updated fairly easily by a church secretary or volunteer. After showing the template to a few friends, they suggested I look into developing a calendar system around it. While this is a bit beyond the scope of what I have time / knowledge for right now, I thought others out there might be able to benefit from this nice little bit of XHTML 1.0.

As of yet, there is nothing automated about it. You’ll still need to type in your month / year and day numbers. It is very light though, and incredibly easy to skin. The XHTML file contains only one table and one div, and the CSS has all been organized alphabetically for easy searching and modifying. To see ideas of how it could be skinned, check out the examples below:

Download source files for all three of these skins here: Calendar.zip (20kb).

Boring Details

This nifty calendar package is released under a Creative Commons License and may be redistributed, modified, tweaked, destroyed or whatever – as long as you do not charge for the work, and give credit where it is due. I just ask that you leave my first line intact in the CSS file, letting people know my name and site address. I would also appreciate an email or comment on this page if you decide to use it, so I can know if anybody actually cares.

It is my hope to see this developed into a lightweight admin system that can be updated monthly. It wouldn’t even have to support a full year, but just have a styled input form that would match the public-side. This would allow someone without HTML experience to update the site, and have the interface be nearly identical to the appearance on the site. The month and day numbers could be deleted and re-saved as needed, along with any scheduled events.

In case you’re thinking it, Yes – a calendar does count as tabular data. And, for those coding purists, the cellspacing="0" remains because according to Dave Shea the border-spacingCSS equivalent is not yet widely supported. I guess that sums things up, go check it out. Oh, and you get some extra points if you tell me where the inspiration came from for the pinky design!